Making Both Ends Meet eBook

V

The application of Scientific Management to women’s
work in the Delaware Bleachery was very limited, extending
only to about 12 girls, all employed in folding and
wrapping cloth.[60] The factory, on the outskirts
of a charming old city in Delaware, is an enormous,
picturesque cement pile, reaching like a bastion along
the Brandywine River, with its windows overlooking
the wooded bank of the stream.

The girls stand in a large room, before tables piled
with great bolts of material, and stamp tickets and
style cards, fasten them to the roll, fold over the
raw edges of the material in a lap, tie two pieces
of ribbon around the bolt, wrap it in paper, stamp
and attach other tickets, and tie it up with cord
to be shipped. Here, after a time-study was made
of the quicker girls in all the operations, different
tasks were set for different weights of material;
and if the task was accomplished, a bonus was paid,
amounting, roughly speaking, to a quarter of the worker’s
hourly wage. The arrangement of the different
processes was so different for each worker, after
and before the system was installed, that none of
the girls could compare the different amounts of work
she completed at the different times. But the
whole output, partly through a better routing of the
work to the tables, and by paying the boys who brought
it a bonus of 5 cents for each worker who made her
bonus, was increased from twenty-five to fifty per
cent.

The girls’ hours were decreased from 10-1/4
a day with frequent overtime up to nine at night to
9-1/4 a day with no overtime, the Saturday half-holiday
remaining unchanged. Here is a list of the changes
in the week wages. The work at the time of the
inquiry was slack. Sometimes there were only
a few hours in the day of wrapping of a kind on which
the task and bonus was applied. Besides, these
workers were in the midst of an establishment managed
by another system. The bonus was given on the
basis of the former wage. And this remained lower
in the case of workers employed fewer years by the
firm, though sometimes their task was the same as
that of workers employed longer. Where the girls
wrapped both the heavier and the lighter materials,
the allotment of these was in the hands of a sub-foreman,
who, instead of being in the new position of a teacher
rewarded for helping each worker to make her bonus,
was in the old position of a distributor of favors.
The slackness of the work had led the management,
in a good-willed attempt to provide as well as possible
for the employees, to place several girls from other
departments under this sub-foreman. One of these
less strong and experienced girls, at the time of
the inquiry, was receiving such an amount of heavy
work that she could wrap only enough of the task to
enable her to earn from $3 to $5 a week. The
firm’s policy was paternalistic, and while in
many ways it had a genuine kindness, it was not in
general sympathy with Scientific Management, though
the superintendent is a thorough and consistent supporter
of the new system. But he had not been able, single
handed, to achieve all the necessary adjustments,
in spite of the decided increase of output the new
methods had already obtained for the company.